How did Scotland yard get it's name?

[mipiace]

Why is Scotland Yard named as it is if it is the UK high investigative agency?

[Otto]

http://www.met.police.uk/history/definition.htm#p7

The task of organising and designing the “New Police” was placed in the hands of Colonel Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne (later Sir Richard Mayne}. These two Commissioners occupied a private house at 4, Whitehall Place, the back of which opened on to a courtyard. The back premises of 4 Whitehall Place were used as a police station. It was this address that led to the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police being known as Scotland Yard. The exact origin of the name is not clear and the following two stories have both gained creedance at various times:

It is said the location had been the site of a residence owned by the Kings of Scotland before the Union and used and occupied by them and/or their ambassadors when in London, and known as '“Scotland”. The courtyard was later used by Sir Christopher Wren and known as “Scotland Yard”.
Number 4 Whitehall Place backed onto a court called Great Scotland Yard, one of three streets incorporating the words “Scotland Yard” in its name. The street names are said to have derived from the land being owned by a man called Scott during the Middle Ages.

[Walloon]

Tom Burnam explains in The Dictionary of Misinformation:

At one time there were two Scotland Yards. Neither had anything to do with the London police force. A tenth-century king of Scotland was given a plot of land in London for a castle, though not without conditions (the Scottish king was required to visit the castle once a year as a form of homage to England). By the seventeenth century, when England and Scotland at last shared the same king, James I, the original site was divided into two areas, Great Scotland Yard and Middle Scotland Yard. But it was not until 1829 that the Metropolitan Police Force (of London), which is the official term for the organization now loosely called “Scotland Yard,” was formed.

[FatBaldGuy]

From The Columbia Encyclopedia

Scotland Yard
headquarters of the London Metropolitan Police. The term is often used, popularly, to refer to one branch, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). Named after a short street in London, the site of a palace used in the 12th cent. as a residence of visiting Scottish kings, it became London’s police center in 1829. New and separate headquarters for the Metropolitan Police were built in 1890 along the Thames embankment and were referred to as New Scotland Yard. In 1967, New Scotland Yard moved to new headquarters, also in the Westminster area.

[Walloon]

Buram adds:

[quote]
Nor is Scotland Yard in any sense a national police, like the FBI; it’s strictly a London outfit. . . Scotland Yard has no more authority over the rest of Britain than the Washington, D.C., police force has over the rest of the United States.

[quote]

And I add:
it’s = it is

[mipiace]

Well thanks…goes to show I’m an American!